Pyramid: A Novel (Jack Howard Series Book 8) Read Online Free PDF Page B

but it could be meters deep. I’m going to ascend slowly just in case a wider view gets anything, and then we’ve got to go.”
    “Wrong, Jack.”
    “What do you mean, ‘wrong’?”
    “I mean,
wrong
. It’s not buried. It was
once
buried, but now it’s all around us. Get over here.”
    Costas began taking photos, the strobes flashing as fast as they could recharge. Jack glanced at the warning light on his dive computer, and then finned over toward him. “I see coral,” he said. “An unusual amount at this depth, but that’s it.”
    Costas switched off the torch on his strobe array, and the brilliant colors that had been lit up in the artificial light were reduced to blue. He pointed to a complex growth of coral at the base of the head. “Now look.”
    Jack stared hard, dropping down in front of a jumble of coral that extended out in front of the head. It reminded him of marine growth on the decayed iron structure of modern wrecks, preserving shapes that would otherwise have disintegrated. He remembered the clandestine First World War shipment at this spot; they might be looking at other material that had fallen off the dhow and become encased in coral after a century underwater.
    He shifted slightly sideways, and then he saw it. “A wheel,” he exclaimed. “I can see the spokes of a wheel, and the curved line of the rim.”
    “Not just one wheel, Jack. There’s another one on the opposite side. And there’s a curved surface in between them, and a shape like a coral-encrusted pole sticking out front.”
    Costas dropped behind Jack, taking pictures of him in front of the head. Jack stared in astonishment. “My God.”
    There was no doubt about it
. He was looking at the preserved form of a chariot encased in coral. “The wheel,” he said hoarsely. “The spacing of the spokes suggests asix-spoke wheel, typical of the New Kingdom. I think we just hit pay dirt.”
    “Bingo,” Costas said. “Congratulations, Jack.”
    “You spotted it.” Jack twisted around, staring. There were dozens of them, hundreds, a cascade of chariots down the slope. He turned back to the one in front of him. The flash of the strobe revealed an unusual color, a shimmer of pale gold emerging from the sand at the base of the head. “Good God,” he exclaimed.
    “What is it?”
    “Get close up and photograph it. There’s about a ten-centimeter-square section of gold there, maybe electrum.”
    “I can see a wing,” Costas muttered, the strobe flashing. “The end of a wing.”
    “It’s the falcon-god Horus,” Jack exclaimed. “Wait till Maurice sees that. The symbol of a pharaoh.”
    “It can’t get much better than this, Jack.”
    Jack pushed off, rose above the coral head, and scanned the others. “I’m trying to understand how this happened. How these chariots were preserved like this.”
    “I’ve got it. Think bodies at Pompeii, Jack. Bodies preserved as hollow casts in the volcanic ash as it solidified over them. Check out the base of that coral head: You can still see traces of the mud that once encased the chariots, now rock-hard. You remember this morning we were scanning the cliff from the dive boat, thinking how unstable it looked? I think those chariots came hurtling over the cliff and caused a massive landslide, enveloping them in earth and debris as they fell to the seafloor. The material in that cliff may contain a volcanic dust like the pozzolana of the Vesuvius area, something that caused the mud to solidify underwater.”
    “Got you,” Jack said. “Like hydraulic concrete.”
    “Exactly. The hardened masses were buried in sand, but as that shifted with the current over the centuries the masses were exposed, some of them resisting erosion long enough for coral to form and preserve them in the way we see them today. That one with the gold frontinghappened to be eroded in such a way that the coral formed over those features just as the mud casing was about to wash away completely, so the features of